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By Andrew D. Ellington
Epigenetics and Society
Did Erasmus Darwin foreshadow the tweaking of his grandson’s paradigm?
We can expect that epigenetics will be held up as the forerunner of that bastard child of Creationism, Intelligent Design.
The potent wish in the productive hour
Calls to its aid Imagination’s power,
O’er embryon throngs with mystic charm presides,
And sex from sex the nascent world divides…
R

By Cristina Luiggi
Imprinting Diversity
Joachim Messing talks about how genomic imprinting may be a strong driver of diversity.
Sexual reproduction yields offspring with two copies of the same gene, one from each parent; but in an epigenetic phenomenon known as genomic imprinting, only one copy of certain genes is turned on or off, depending on which parent contributed it. Imprinted genes are stamped by patterns of DNA methylation or histone modification during g

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Climate Change and Health
While all of the problems associated with global warming can initially be countered to some extent in some, most, or all places given enough capital outlay for technology, etc., the basic problem this article1 points out is that, at some point in time, if global temperatures continue to rise, there will eventually not be enough resources everywhere to handle things.
For example, the increasing incidence of malar

By Cristina Luiggi
Medicinal Alchemy, circa 1512
Related Articles
The art of alchemy
Stem cell alchemy
The discovery of DNA, circa 1869
During the Middle Ages, alchemists developed sophisticated ways to tap the medicinal powers of the Earth’s bounty. Depending on the ailment being treated, flowers, herbs, spices, minerals, and animal flesh all potentially held cures, which could be extracted employing methods not unlike those used by modern organ

By Richard P. Grant
Mitotic Hijacker
HIDDEN JEWEL
When a cell divides, its duplicated chromosomes have to be shared equally between the two daughter cells. Cells manage this feat by lining up replicated chromosomes along their equators during mitosis, and then pulling sister chromatids apart to the right destinations. But Theileria, an intracellular parasitic protozoan, also needs to divide when its host cell undergoes mitosis. Dirk Dobbelaere and colleagu

By Cristina Luiggi
Resistant to Failure
Vance Fowler’s postdoc Sun-Hee Ahn
Duke University Medical Center
In 2006 Duke University clinician Vance Fowler found the perfect animal model to investigate a question that had been bugging him ever since he started his residency at the university’s medical school in the mid-1990s: Why were some patients much better at fighting off bacterial infections than others?
Scanning research on more than 20 differ

Speaking of Science
Behavioural Ecology Research Group, Oxford
How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will be his results, compared with those accumulated by Nature during whole geological periods!
—Charles Darwin, On The Origin of Species (1859)
Why them? Why is this species [the New Caledonian crow] on a small island in the Pacific able to not just use but to manufacture a variety of tool